Catholic cleric comes out against Jewish state

As reported by JTA, a Jewish news service:

The Roman Catholic Church's top cleric in the Holy Land said Israel should not be designated a Jewish state.

Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah came out this week against the Olmert government's demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state before peace talks can proceed.

"God made this land for all three of us so a suitable state is one who can adapt itself to the vocation of this land," said Sabbah, an Arab who was born in the northern Israeli town of Nazareth and who regularly officiates at religious events in the Palestinian Authority town of Bethlehem.

"If it's Jewish, it's not Muslim or Christian," he told reporters.

Sabbah had no word on whether a future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip should not be allowed to favor Muslims given those territories' sanctity to Jews and Christians.

Israel guarantees freedom of worship to all faiths.



My position is this. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is illegal, and Israel must remove all settlements, remove the wall, and withdraw to the 1967 boundaries, aka the Green Line. Israel should also renounce an exclusive claim to Jerusalem.

However, Muslims and Christians would do well to remember that, like Indigenous peoples, many Jews derive their identity from their land. For many Jews, there is no option other than for Israel to be a Jewish state. Jewishness is more than just a religion, and more than just an ethnicity. It is an identity.

Now, of course, that identity can be misused for political gain, and there are those in Israel who are doing so. As I said earlier, a people who have been persecuted will often revisit the oppressive ways they have learned on others. However, Christians and Muslims would do well to gain some understanding of what it means to be Jewish, and what the Jewish people have suffered through the centuries. It won't produce any easy solution to the Middle East crisis, but it will produce understanding.

Pray for the Middle East.